Cameron Acts Like the Front-Runner He Would Like to Be

LONDON — At his party conference last week in Birmingham, Prime Minister David Cameron pulled out all the stops.

Mr. Cameron made a queasily emotional appeal about his support for the National Health Service by making a reference to his dead son. Then he mocked the Labour Party’s leader, Ed Miliband, to his left, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, Nigel Farage, to his right, and even his own coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats.

But as a real indication of the desperation of his Conservative Party, seven months before Britain’s next election, Mr. Cameron promised 30 million voters more than $11 billion in tax cuts without a hint about how he would pay for them.

Just as airily, Mr. Cameron promised to reduce Britain’s large budget deficit a further $40 billion without touching the health service. And he pledged to have a balanced budget in 2018, a vow that seems highly unlikely, given that Britain’s deficit is still running at 5.5 percent of gross domestic product and now sits at more than $151 billion.

For those on the right, Mr. Cameron vowed to negotiate new restrictions on the ability of immigrants from other European countries to come to Britain and work. “When it comes to free movement,” he said, “I will get what Britain needs.”

But what a large number of Britons want is what Mr. Cameron cannot get for them — an end to the European Union’s principle of free movement of people and labor, one of the main reasons a sizable minority of Conservatives, and the U.K. Independence Party, want to leave the European Union altogether.

The Conservatives also pledged to overrule decisions of the European Court of Human Rights if they overturned British laws, another pledge of questionable legality.

But Mr. Cameron delivered a polished, prime-ministerial address; a sharp contrast to Mr. Miliband’s wandering speech to his own party convention the previous week in Manchester. Speaking with few notes and strolling the stage, Mr. Miliband somehow omitted — or repressed — any mention of the budget deficit or immigration.

Mr. Miliband said he simply forgot those sections of his speech, causing much glee among the Tories. Mr. Cameron reminded Britons that he himself had once forgot his young daughter, Nancy, down at the pub after a Sunday lunch. “But if you want to be prime minister of this country,” he said, “you cannot forget the biggest challenge we face.”

Mr. Cameron still has a large lead over Mr. Miliband in perceptions of economic competence, so he perhaps could risk throwing economic reality to the winds to appeal to disappointed voters tempted to go left or right.

After the party conferences, Mr. Cameron got a boost in the polls. But his task is a tough one.

No governing party in recent memory has done better in a second election than in the first, not even the Tories under Margaret Thatcher or Labour under Tony Blair, said Tony Travers, a professor in the government department of the London School of Economics.

Historically, Professor Travers said, governing parties lose about 1.2 percent of the vote a year. And even if Mr. Cameron wins 36 percent of the vote, as he did last time, it will not be enough to return him to Downing Street with a parliamentary majority, and perhaps not even as the largest party.

Though Labour appears to be floundering now, it remains the favorite to form the next government in a divided Britain, where the two main parties, which together received about 98 percent of the vote 50 years ago, now get barely two-thirds. As such, there is a very real likelihood of a hung Parliament and a weak coalition government after the election on May 7.

“Withered old husks that call themselves political parties vying to govern with just over a third of the vote on perhaps a 65 percent turnout,” said Janan Ganesh, a political columnist with the Financial Times. He was exaggerating a little, but the point is well taken. History is not a very good guide when a system built on two-party domination is faced with four credible parties or even five, including the Greens, or even more, with parties from Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The strangest part of the party conference season, the last before the election, was how optimistic the Conservatives were, and how flat and unenthusiastic Labour was, even though this is an election that party should normally win.

But Labour, too, has significant problems, with the 44-year-old Mr. Miliband not judged to have the gravitas of a prime minister, and close to 60 percent of voters dissatisfied with his performance. While voters believe Labour will enhance the National Health Service, the party is still regarded as untrustworthy on the economy.

“Labour is not doing as well as they might have hoped as the main party of opposition,” said Patrick Dunleavy, a professor of political science at the London School of Economics. He noted that at this stage before the last election, in 2010, the opposition Conservatives had a lead of 15 percentage points; Labour is now essentially tied with the Conservatives in some polls, despite the near collapse of the Liberal Democrats.

But Mr. Farage and UKIP are a real and present danger for Mr. Cameron, because they appeal to those who would normally vote Conservative but regard his government as insufficiently anti-European. UKIP should win its first seat in Parliament this week, with a Tory convert, Douglas Carswell, expected to retain the seat he won for the Conservatives in Clacton-on-Sea.

The Independence Party, which won 3 percent of the vote in 2010, is running around 13 percent in various polls, and Mr. Farage is viewed as favorably as Mr. Cameron. While UKIP will not win many seats, most voters leaning toward the party are Tory voters in marginal districts, whose defections could throw seats to Labour or the Liberal Democrats, which will remain the third-largest party and could again end up as the power broker in a hung Parliament.

As Mr. Cameron warned graphically in Birmingham, in one of his better lines, “On the 7th of May, you could go to bed with Nigel Farage and wake up with Ed Miliband.”

As for Labour, it is getting a boost from the collapse of the Liberal Democrats, who are being punished by voters for going into government as junior partners with the Tories. Having won 23 percent of the vote in 2010, the Liberal Democrats have fallen below 9 percent in most polls.

Labour also has a built-in advantage from the way constituency boundaries are drawn. It can win a majority with around 34 or 35 percent of the vote, Professor Dunleavy said, while the Conservatives need about 40 percent.

But it is hard to overestimate the anti-European tone of the campaign. Even Mr. Cameron, when asked, said he cared “1,000 times more strongly” about Britain than Europe and would “not be heartbroken” if Britain exited the European Union.

While most Britons believe that Mr. Cameron wants to stay in the union, one of his main pleas to voters who are considering voting for UKIP is that he is the only candidate with a chance of power who has promised to deliver a referendum on membership in the bloc.

Mr. Miliband has refused to back that pledge, saying that Britain belongs in Europe, not outside of it.

After the agonies of the Scottish referendum, Mr. Cameron’s pledge is just one more reason some believe that Britain is heading into unstable and uncertain political waters, and that a Labour government is more likely to provide stability than a Conservative one — though it is not yet clear what kind of government Britain may get.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Cameron Acts Like the Front-Runner He Would Like to Be. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe